Anyone who has been here at the right time of year has been amazed at the number of hummingbirds that come to my feeders. The thrumming of wings from fifty-plus little helicopters fills the air, and there are flashes of brilliant green and red as they dart and wheel. Hummers make a clicking sound, not a chirp and not a song...tiny little castanets...and they are noisy. A few of these little guys winter over, but most go elsewhere when the temperature drops. The other evening, I noticed a couple of them at the juice bottle, and decided it was time to start filling the feeders again. This morning at dawn there were ten bellied up to the bar. In just the summer months last year, I went through over seventy-five pounds of sugar, filling three four-cup feeders at least twice a day. Where do they put it all? When the ladies from the Red Hat Society would come, the hummers would practically swarm them because of their red hats gaily decorated with flowers...too much temptation for the birds. I want desperately to see a baby hummer. Knowing how small the eggs must be, how does that long beak fit? Does it start out small and grow after hatching? Is it long, but soft like the goat baby hooves, and harden later? I know what and how robins and eagles feed their chicks in the nest, but how in the world does a mother feed a baby hummer...reverse straw action?
The sun is breaking out this morning (!!) and the jackrabbits are traveling in numbers up and down the driveway. The mouse in the laying box was there again last night. I was more cautious as I reached into the dark recesses, but it still startled me. Now I'm concerned that it's a mother mouse who believes she has found the maternity ward. I really don't think I want to touch a nest of teensy hairless mouse babies. One just never knows what the day will bring.
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75 lbs of sugar? If you're not careful you're gonna find some of the little guys splayed out on the porch suffering from a diabetic coma and then you'll be spending afternoons checking their blood sugar and filling select feeders with Splenda and eventually...insulin! Sounds like your little mommy mices have found an Eggsubator to keep the kiddies warm. I'm a little worried the baby mice are in danger of growing up confused about their actual identity. Do they come in to roost at dusk or do they forage for food at nite? "Mommy? I sit on my mouse nest allllllll day waiting to lay an egg but every time I check all I see are little turds".
Funny, Mark! And over in Fiddletown, the same story plays out with the hummingbird feeders and the constant path between the mixing of sugar water in the kitchen, and the hanging in the trees out in the patio. I have never SEEN so many birds clustered around the industrial-sized feeders (no cute little gift-shop jobbies here), and I had never seen a hummingbird NOT in flight until I started looking in the branches...and there they were...tiny and stationary - who knew they ever slowed down!
There is no exaggeration in the tale of the hummingbirds. When I visited, their noise was so overwhelming that I had to escape to back inside the house..and I've lived by an air force base. Fighter jets have nothing on a swarm of hummingbirds!
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